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Early-stage development of a digital edition of Franz Boas' The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, which will be annotated extensively by joining distributed collections from archival and museum collections.

Under the rubric of a new Franz Boas Critical Edition book series, we propose to reprint and annotate Boas's important 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians in both print and as a multimedia website. Framed with scholarly essays and contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw perspectives, the new editions will re-unite the original text with widely distributed archival and museum collections that shed new light on the book. This project will reveal the nature of co-authorship in Boas's work, use multimedia to return sensory richness to his ethnography, and make this historic research more relevant to contemporary scholars and indigenous communities. The Digital Humanities Start Up Grant (level II) will be used to fund a workshop to plan the digital edition; for design of a wiki for collaborative research; for travel to determine the full range of materials to be digitized; for production of sample webpages to test interfaces and functionality; for salary toward project administration and digital technology assistance; and for development of innovative software to reproduce and render searchable the large amounts of Kwakw'ala-language materials.